CHAPTER I.

SWAMMERDAM.

What was known of the Infinite prior to 1600? Nothing whatever. Nothing of the infinitely great; nothing of the infinitely little. The celebrated page of Pascal, very frequently cited upon this subject, is the frank astonishment of a humanity so old and yet so young, which begins to be aware of its prodigious ignorance, opens its eyes to the Real, and awakens between two abysses.

No one forgets that in 1610 Galileo, having received from Holland a magnifying lens, constructed the telescope, elevated it in position, and saw the firmament. But it is less generally known that Swammerdam, seizing, with the instinct of genius, on the imperfect microscope, directed it to the lower world, and was the first to detect the living infinite, the world of animated atoms! These great men succeeded one another. At the epoch of the famous Italian's death (1632) was born the Hollander, the Galileo of the infinitely little (1637).

An astounding revolution! The abyss of life was unfolded in its profundity with myriads upon myriads of unknown beings and fantastic organizations of which men had not even dared to dream. But the most surprising circumstance is, that the very method of the sciences underwent a total change. Hitherto men had relied upon their senses. The severest observation invoked their testimony, and they thought that no appeal could lie from their judgment. But now behold experiment and the senses themselves, rectified by a powerful auxiliary, confess that not only have they concealed from us the greater part of things, but that, in those they have laid bare, they have every moment been mistaken!

Nothing is more curious than to observe the very opposite impressions produced by these two revolutions upon their authors. Galileo before the infinite of heaven, where all appeared harmonious and marvellously ordered, felt more of joy than of surprise; he announced his discoveries to Europe in a style of the greatest enthusiasm. Swammerdam, before the infinite of the microscopic world, seemed overcome with terror. He recoiled before the spectacle of Nature at war, devouring her very self. He grew perturbed; he seemed to fear that all his ideas and beliefs would be overthrown: a melancholy and singular condition, which, added to his incessant labours, shortened his days. Let us pause awhile to dwell upon this creator of science, who was also its martyr.

The eminent physician Boerhaave, who, a hundred years after Swammerdam's time, published with pious care his "Bible of Nature," gave utterance to a surprising observation, which sets one a-dreaming:--

"He had an ardent imagination of impassioned melancholy, which raised him to the sublime."

Thus, this surpassing master in all the works of patient inquiry, this insatiable observer of the most minute details, who pursued Nature so far into the imperceptible, was a poetic soul, a man of imagination, one of those mournful spirits who groan after nothing less than the infinite, and die because they fail to conquer it.

His was a remarkable combination of mental endowments which, at the first glance, seem opposed to one another: a love of the great, and a taste for the subtlest researches; a sublimity of aim, and that obstinacy of analysis which would subdivide the atom, and yet never cry, "Hold, enough!" But, in reality, are these qualities of so contradictory a nature? By no means. Men whose hearts are filled with the love of Nature will declare that they harmonize admirably. Nothing great and nothing little. For the lover a simple hair is worth as much as, frequently more than, a world.

He was born in a cabinet of natural history; and his birth decided his destiny. The cabinet, formed by his father, an apothecary of Amsterdam, was a pell-mell, a chaos. The child wished to arrange it, and drew up a catalogue of it. A modest ambition led him from point to point, until he became the greatest naturalist of the century.

His father was one of the zealot collectors who then became common in Holland--insatiable treasurers of diverse rarities. It was not with pictures--though Rembrandt was then in his glory--it was not with antiquities, that he filled his house. But all that the ships brought back from the two Indies of minerals, plants, fantastic and extraordinary animals, he acquired at any cost, and heaped up in piles. These marvels of the unknown world, contrasting by their splendour and tropical magnificence with the gloomy climate which received them and the pale sea of the North, aroused in the young Hollander's mind a lively curiosity and a passionate devotion to Nature.

A very good Dutch painter has drawn a charming picture of the young Grotius: a universal scholar at twelve years of age, surrounded by folios, maps, charts, and all the appliances of learning. How much I should have preferred that the same artist--or rather the all-powerful magician, Rembrandt--had revealed to us the mysterious study, that brilliant chaos of the three kingdoms, and the young Swammerdam endeavouring to grasp the grand enigma!

The crowds and prodigious movement of Amsterdam favoured his solitude. The Babylons of commerce are for the thinker profound deserts. In that dumb ocean of men of mercantile activity, on the border of sluggish canals, he lived almost like Robinson Crusoe in his island. Isolated even in the midst of his family, who could not comprehend him, he seldom emerged from his cabinet, and descended on the fewest possible occasions into the paternal shop.

His sole recreation was to go in search of insects in the little soil which Holland offers above the waters. The melancholy meads, covered with Paul Potter's herds, possess, in the moist warmth of the summer, a great variety of animal life. The traveller is much impressed when he sees the crane, the stork, and the crow, elsewhere hostile, reconciled here by the abundance of their food, which they frequently hunt in company on terms of perfect accord. Hence the landscape acquires a peculiar charm. The cattle assume an air of placid security which they do not elsewhere exhibit. The summer is short, and early assumes the gravity of autumn. Man and Nature--all appears of a pacific character, harmonized in a great moral sweetness and remarkable seriousness of mood.

Enthusiastic collector as his father was, he grieved to see the youth of Swammerdam thus employed. It had been his ambition to make of his son a renowned minister who should shine in controversy, and an eloquent preacher. But his son seemed daily to grow more dumb. The chagrined father lowered his views from glory to money. In that golden city, so feverish and so diseased, no career is more lucrative than that of a physician. But here arose another difficulty. Swammerdam threw himself heartily into his medical studies; but on condition that he created them--as yet they did not exist. Therefore, the basis on which he desired to rest them was the preliminary creation of the natural sciences. How cure the sick man unless you understood the healthy? And how understand the latter without studying side by side the inferior animals which translate and explain disease? But can one see into such delicate mysteries with the eye alone? Does not the feebleness of the sense of vision lead us astray? The serious creation of science would suppose a reform of our senses and the creation of optics.

A veritable creation! Look at the microscope. Is it a simple spy-glass? To the eyes which the instrument possessed, Swammerdam added two arms, one of which bears the glass and the other the object. He himself says, in reference to his more difficult investigations, "that he had attempted to obtain the assistance of another person, but that such assistance proved, in fact, an obstacle." It was for this reason that he organized a dumb man of copper, a discreet servant ready for every work; thanks to whom the observer disposes of supplementary hands and numerous eyes of different degrees of power. In the same manner as the birds expand or contract their visual organs, either to grasp objects in a whole or to scrutinize with searching glance the smallest detail, Swammerdam created the method of successive enlargement; the art of employing lenses of different sizes and varying curvature, which permit the observer to see _en masse_, and to study each separate portion, and finally to survey the whole for the purpose of properly replacing the details and reconstituting the general harmony.

Was this all? No. To observe dead bodies, time is required; but then time robs us of them. Death, which seemingly conduces to study by its immobility, is deceitful; it fixes the mask for a moment, and the object beneath melts away. Now came a new creation of Swammerdam's. He not only taught us to see and investigate, but he devised means for our permanent investigation. By preservative injections he fixed these ephemeral objects; he compelled time to halt, and forced death to endure. The Czar Peter, who, a long time afterwards, saw in the dissecting-room of one of Swammerdam's disciples the beautiful body, supple and fresh, of a little child, with its exquisite carnation tint, thought that the rose was living, and could not be prevented from embracing it.

All this is soon said; but it was long to do. How many attempts! What miracles of patience, of delicacy, of skilful management! In exact proportion as one descends the scale of littleness, the insufficiency of our means proves more and more embarrassing. We can touch nothing without breaking it. Our large fingers will hold no more: they cast a shadow, they throw obstacles in our way. Our instruments are too coarse to seize upon such atoms; therefore we refine them. But then how can we put the invisible point in an invisible object? The two terms in sight avoid us. Only one single passion--the unconquerable love of life and Nature, the undefinable, indescribable tenderness, a feminine sensibility directed by a masculine, scientific genius--could succeed in so great an aim. Our Hollander loved the tiny creatures. He dreaded wounding them so much that he spared the scalpel. He avoided as far as he could the steel, and preferred the firm but nevertheless the delicate ivory. He fashioned in it infinitely small instruments, sharpened by aid of the microscope, which would not work rapidly, and compelled the student to make his observations with due patience.

His tender respect for Nature found its reward. While still a youth, and a simple student at Leyden University, he had two strong holds upon her in her highest and lowest manifestations. He was the first to see and understand the maternity of the insect and the human maternity. The latter subject, so delicate and yet so grand--in which he laboured conjointly with his master at Leyden--I put aside: let us dwell upon the former. He dissected and described the ovaries of the bee: found them in the pretended "king;" and proved that she was a queen, or rather a mother. In like manner he explained the maternity of the ant; an all-important discovery, which revealed the true mystery of the superior insect, and initiated us into the real character of these societies, which are not monarchies, but maternal republics and vast public nurseries, each of which raises up a people.

The most general fact in the life of insects, and the great law of their existence, is the Metamorphosis. Changes which in other creatures are obscure, are in them exceedingly conspicuous. The three ages of the insect appear to be three creatures. Who would have dared to assert that the grub, with its heavy luxuriance of digestive organs and its great hairy feet, was identical with a winged and ethereal being, the butterfly?

He dared to say, and by the most delicate anatomy he demonstrated, that the larva, the pupa, and the butterfly represented three conditions of the same individual, three natural and legitimate evolutions of its life.

How did learned Europe welcome this novel science of metamorphoses? That was the question. Swammerdam, young and without authority, without any position in the academy or university, lived in his cabinet. Scarcely anything of his works was published during his life, nor even fifty years afterwards, so that his discoveries might circulate and advantage all, rather than himself and his fame.

Holland remained indifferent. Eminent professors in the University of Leyden were opposed to him; and took umbrage at the fact that a simple student placed himself by his discoveries on a level with them, or even above them.

The miserable and necessitous condition in which his father left him was not calculated to recommend him greatly in a country like Holland. In his costly labours he was supported by the generosity of his friends. At Leyden it was Van Horn, his professor of anatomy, who defrayed all his expenses.

At this epoch two illustrious academies were founded,--the Royal Society of London and the _Académie des Sciences_ of Paris. But the former, specially inspired by the genius of Harvey, a pupil of Padua, turned its gaze towards Italy, and addressed its inquiries to the distinguished and very accurate observer, Malpighi, who furnished at its request the anatomy of the silkworm. I know not why the Englishmen turned aside from Holland, and did not also interrogate the genius of Swammerdam.

He was honoured only in France. It was here, in the neighbourhood of Paris, that he made the first public demonstration of his discovery. His friend Thévenot, the famous traveller and publisher of travels, collected around him at Issy different classes of _savants_, linguists, orientalists, and, before all, inquiring students of Nature. Such was the origin of the _Académie des Sciences_. One might justly say that the revelation of the illustrious Hollander inaugurated its cradle.

A Frenchman rescued from the hands of the Inquisition the last manuscripts of Galileo. A Frenchman also--Thévenot--supported Swammerdam with his purse and credit. He was desirous of establishing him at Paris. On the other hand, the Grand-Duke of Tuscany invited him to Florence. But the fate of Galileo was too strong a warning. Even in France there was little safety. The mystic Morin was burned at Paris in 1664; the very year in which Molière performed the first acts of his "Tartuffe." Swammerdam, who was then residing there, might have been present at both spectacles.

He himself, notwithstanding his positivism, showed very singular tendencies towards mysticism. The more deeply he entered into details, the more eagerly did he long to reascend to the general source of love and life; an impotent effort which consumed him. Already, at the age of thirty-two, excessive toil, chagrin, and religious melancholy brought him to the grave. From his early years he had suffered from the fevers so common in Holland, that land of swamp and morass, and had not paid due attention to them. He studied with his microscope every day from dawn till noon; the remainder of the day he wrote. And for his studies he preferred the summer days, with their strong light and burning sunshine. Then he would remain, with his head bare that he might not lose the smallest ray, frequently until deluged and bathed in sweat. His eyesight grew very weak.

He was already in a feeble condition when, in 1669, he published in a preliminary essay the principle of the metamorphosis of insects. He was sure of being immortal; but so much the more in danger of dying of hunger. His father thenceforth withdrew from him all assistance. Swammerdam by his discoveries (as of the lymphatic vessels and hernias) had very considerably promoted the progress of medicine, and even of surgery; but he was not a physician. From a spirit of obedience he had attempted to practise: he could not continue, and fell ill. He was now without a home. His father shut up his house, retired to live with his son-in-law, and bade Swammerdam provide for himself, and lodge where he would. A wealthy friend had often solicited him to reside with him. When expelled from the paternal roof, he made an effort to seek out this friend and remind him of his offer; but he remembered it no longer.

Misfortunes now accumulated upon his head. Poor and infirm, and dragging himself along the streets of Amsterdam with a large collection which he knew not where to store away, he received another terrible shock--the ruin of his country. The earth sunk under his feet.

It was the fatal year of 1672, when Holland seemed crushed by the invasion of Louis XIV. Assuredly his fatherland had not spoiled Swammerdam; but nevertheless it was the native home of science, of free reason, the asylum of human thought. And lo! she sank, engulfed by the hosts of the French; engulfed in the ocean which she had summoned to her assistance. She lived only by committing suicide. Did she live? Yes; but to be thenceforth no more than the shadow of her former greatness.

The infinite melancholy of such a change has had its painter and its poet in Ruysdaël, who was born and who died in Swammerdam's time, and, like him, at the age of forty. When I contemplate in the Louvre the inestimable picture which that Museum possesses of him, the one leads me to think of the other. The little man who followed the gloomy route of the dunes at the approach of the storm reminds me of my insect-hunter; and the sublime marine picture of the palisade in the red-brown waters, chafing so terribly, and electrified by the tempest, seems a dramatic expression of the moral tempests which poor Swammerdam experienced when he wrote "The Ephemera"--"among tears and sobs."

The Ephemera is the fly which is born but to die, living a single hour of love.

But Swammerdam did not enjoy that hour; and it seems as if he spent his too brief life in a state of complete isolation. At the age of thirty-six he was already drawing near his end. The depths of imagination and universal tenderness in his nature could not be alimented by the barren controversies of the age. In this condition there accidentally fell into his hand an unknown work,--a woman's book. This sweet voice spoke to his very soul, and somewhat consoled him. It was one of the _opuscula_ of a celebrated mystic of that age, Mademoiselle Bourignon.

Poor as was Swammerdam, he undertook a pilgrimage to Germany, where she resided, and went to see his consoler. He found in the journey a very real assistance in escaping at the least from his contention with the _savants_, his rivals, in forgetting every collision, and in remitting to God alone his defence and his discoveries.

He longed to withdraw himself into a profound solitude. For this purpose it was necessary he should dispose of the dear and precious cabinet on which he had spent his days, in which he had enshrined his heart, and which had at length become a portion of himself. He must tear himself from it. At this cost he calculated that he would obtain a revenue sufficient for his wants; but the very loss and separation he longed for he could not undergo. Neither in Holland nor in France could buyers be found for the cabinet. Perhaps the wealthy amateurs, who think of nothing but empty _éclat_, did not find in it the glittering species which give us a child's pleasure. The great inventor's collection offered things more serious: the logical order and arrangement of his discoveries; that eloquent and living method which had guided his genius to new achievements. Alas! it perished, scattered abroad.

Having been for a long time ill, in 1680, either through weakness, or a disgust for life and men, he shut himself up, and would not go out any more. He bequeathed his manuscripts to his faithful and life-long friend, whom, when dying, he himself styled the "incomparable,"--the Frenchman Thévenot. He died aged forty-three.

What really killed him? His own science. The too abrupt revelation wounded and seized upon him. If Pascal saw an imaginary abyss opening before him, what would happen to this Dutch Pascal, who saw the real abyss and the limitless profundity of the unexpected world? It was not a matter of a decreasing scale of abstract greatnesses or of inorganic atoms, but of the successive envelopment and prodigious movements of beings which are the one in the other. For the little we see, each animal is a tiny planet, a small world inhabited by animals still more diminutive, which in their turn are inhabited by others very much smaller. And this, too, without end or rest, except from the powerlessness of our senses and the imperfection of optical science.

All men now began to fathom, and incessantly toil in, that infinity which the hand of Swammerdam had opened up to them. From that time Europe laboured therein with diverse aims. Leuwenhoek, precipitating himself upon it, discovered and conquered new worlds. The Italian positivist, Malpighi, showed perhaps the highest boldness. He proved that the insect has a heart--a heart which beats like man's. One has not far to go to endow it also with a soul. Swammerdam, who was living then, was terrified by the fact. He drew back affrighted from the declivity; he wished to keep his footing, and was fain to doubt the existence of the heart.

It seemed to him that the science to which he had given the first impulse, which he had launched on the flood of his discoveries, was conducting him to something great and terrible which he shrank from seeing: like one who, adrift on the enormous sea of fresh water which dashes headlong in the Niagara Falls, perceives himself impelled by a calm but invincible and mighty movement--whither? He will not, and he dare not, think!